A year-long political conflict between the tiny, wealthy state of Qatar and its larger neighbours - including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - has been fought with a new arsenal of weapons: bots, fake news and hacking.

In the early hours of 24 May 2017, a news story appeared on the website of Qatar's official news agency, QNA, reporting that the country's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, had made an astonishing speech.

The quotes then appeared on the QNA's social media accounts and on the news ticker running along the bottom of the screen on videos uploaded to the agency's YouTube channel.

The emir was quoted praising Islamist groups Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And perhaps most controversially of all, Iran, Saudi Arabia's arch-rival.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44294826

AdamG

01-22-2019, 12:38 PM

International cyber flame-fanning. When CNN claims this account was based in Brazil, I wonder if they made any attempt to confirm or follow it to it's root source.

The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.
The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. "Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020," its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.

But wait - there's more!

Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at Storyful, a service that vets content online, was monitoring Twitter activity on Saturday morning and said the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.
In one indicator of the @2020fight's video's virality, multiple newsrooms, including some national American outlets, reached out to the user asking them directly about the video.
McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its "high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else's image in the profile photo."
Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher who saw the tweet and shared it herself on Saturday, said she later realized that a network of anonymous accounts were working to amplify the video.

information warfare researcher is a thing. Huh.

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN Business, "Deliberate attempts to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter by using misleading account information is a violation of the Twitter Rules."
CNN Business was unable to reach the person, or people, behind the account, to ask if they were indeed a California schoolteacher that chose to use someone else's picture. Soon after we pointed out on Twitter that the account was using a different woman's profile picture, the account blocked this reporter.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/tech/twitter-suspends-account-native-american-maga-teens/index.html

AdamG

03-08-2019, 03:46 PM

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman says that websites in the country are constantly under cyberattack by the United States, and that shows why Russia is pursuing an autonomous Internet.

Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday that the United States has carried out a number of digital attacks on Russian entities and people. "This is the reality with which we live," he said, according to Russian state news agency Tass.

His remarks followed a Washington Post report that the U.S. Cyber Command, in the midst of the 2018 midterm elections, blocked Internet access to a St. Petersburg-based organization accused of spreading disinformation, the Internet Research Agency.